New City to 36,000 Population in Five Years

“We are adding 500 houses per year. Our community was only established in 1999,” was how Michelle Petitti, Deputy Mayor of Sammamish, WA explained to me earlier this week when I was addressing the Northwest Economic Development Course in Ellensburg, WA. I had to see this town for myself, so I made a point of going by it on my way back to the airport in Seattle.

I got off of I-90 at a brand new exit in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains to visit this new town. I drove by new housing developments, new schools and other signs of economic progress in this town 30 miles east of Seattle.

Seventy miles east of Sammamish, over the Snoqualmie Pass, on winding and steep mountain roads, over 2,000 people per day are making a daily commute from Kittitas County, WA into Seattle. It is a very scenic drive, but not one I would want to make once a week, much less every day, especially during the winter.

But people are making these moves and enduring the long commutes to more pastoral settings in places like Sammamish because of their search for a higher quality of life for themselves and their families. The keys for communities like Sammamish, Ellensburg and others is how to fully utilize economic development, especially the paradigm shift toward entrepreneurism, to attract not just houses but also high paying jobs to their towns.